Flapper (36 page)

If Colleen Moore was Hollywood’s archetype of the safe flapper—unthreatening, endearing, hapless, more bark than bite—and if Clara Bow represented the naughty flapper who flirted and smoked a lot but could always be counted on to see the error of her fast-living ways, Louise Brooks was the real deal.

Ironically, of the three great flapper actresses who graced the silver screen in the 1920s, Brooks arrived in Hollywood last and exited first. Long before Colleen Moore and Clara Bow adopted the flapper
mystique as their own, and long after both women abandoned that image for different kinds of roles, Brooks—with her distinctive jet black bob, piercing gaze, and lithe dancer’s body—lived the life of the New Woman in ways that made Zelda Fitzgerald seem like a conservative schoolmarm.

Brooks was born in the small town of Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906. Her father, Leonard, was an attorney for a local oil and gas company, and her mother, Myra, was a vain but uncommonly bright autodidact whose dual regrets in life were that she lived in Kansas rather than Chicago or New York and that she bore her husband four children whose needs and wants distracted her from more rarefied pursuits.

To her parents’ great credit, Louise grew up surrounded by books, music, art, and ideas. Years later, she remembered their house in Wichita, where her family moved in 1919, as a “fourteen-room gray frame structure [that was] literally falling down with books.
⁴
The foundation on the right side had sunk eleven inches from the weight of the lawbooks in Father’s third-floor retreat. There were new books in the bedrooms, old books in the basement, and unread books in the living room.”

As a child, Louise reveled in exploring the overstuffed shelves in the family’s library. She pulled down volumes at random—Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Darwin, Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain. “All these books I read with delight, not caring in the least that I understood little of what I read,” she admitted. When she was five years old, Louise began learning to sound out words by following along as her mother read to her from
A Child’s Garden of Verses
and
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
She never stopped reading. In the mid-1920s, when she was a feature chorus girl in
Ziegfeld Follies
, Louise passed the time in the communal dressing room devouring works like Aldous Huxley’s
Crome Yellow.
“The other girls were reading the
Police Gazette,”
she sneered. “They would look at me and say, ‘Who is this Kansas bitch? How dare she?’ ”
⁵

It didn’t make her any more popular on Hollywood movie sets in the late twenties when she passed the time between takes with a dog-eared volume of Schopenhauer.

Intellectual pursuits aside, Louise’s childhood appeared conventional enough. Like so many other girls coming of age in the early twenties, she was boy crazy. Her diary for 1921, when she was just fourteen years old, chronicled in considerable detail one ill-fated romance after another.

May 7: Marene and I have some affair. We were together all evening, and he brought me home in Dinman’s car. We rode around for
quite
a while, and oh, boy! … Well, I’m crazy about Marene, and I surely have him going. I suppose I’ll be lovesick for a few days.

June 14: Meridith and I are still devoted. We went down to see the river several times.

June 22: Sally Lahey is crazy about Meridith, and she said not a few catty things to me. There was a boy who was hanging about me incessantly. Mercy! Don’t boys love con-man stuff. I have let M. knock me around enough to ruin anyone. They love to lord it over us, and I pretend to be so weak.

June 23: Honestly—I must be boy struck, I mope around all day now and take no interest in the things that used to be so nice.… I have been swimming a great deal lately with Campbells and Meridith. We have lots of fun. Robert is awfully rough. He throws me around considerably, but you know what women love.…

June 30: I have a new one on the string—Everett Fox. I know I have him jolly well.

A week later: Charles Corbett … kissed me five times—the villain—and some of the other boys tried it.

What Louise didn’t confide to her diary, her parents, or her friends was that when she was nine years old, a local handyman, Mr.
⁶
Flowers, lured her into his house with the promise of freshly made popcorn and sexually assaulted her. When she was fourteen, her
Sunday school teacher, a prosperous businessman named Mr. Vincent, seduced her into posing for provocative photographs and, a short while later, a sexual affair.

Quite possibly, these early crimes had something to do with her propensity to detach sex from emotion. “Love is a publicity stunt,” she later mused, “and making love—after the first curious raptures—is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studios to call.”
⁷
One got the sense that Louise Brooks liked sex, but only when it was divorced from other ways of feeling.

If she wasn’t necessarily paying close attention to her daughter’s well-being—once, when young Louise plaintively admitted to breaking a piece of her mother’s prized Haviland china, Myra replied dismissively, “Now, dear, don’t bother me when I am memorizing Bach”—Myra Brooks compensated for her lack of warmth by introducing her daughter to a world that extended far beyond the limits of rural Kansas.
⁸

While most of her classmates didn’t even know what or who Condé Nast was, Louise was a subscriber—courtesy of her parents—to
Vanity Fair
and
Harper’s Bazaar.
She accompanied her mother to orchestral and dance recitals, took several years of intense ballet training, and knew more about important currents in the performing arts than most New Yorkers, let alone Kansans. In particular, Myra and Louise were both admirers of the new modern dance methods then being pioneered by the disciplines of Isadora Duncan.

A week before Thanksgiving in 1921—only three days after Louise’s fifteenth birthday—Wichita’s Crawford Theater hosted a rare heartland performance by Denishawn, a prominent modern dance company headquartered in New York and directed by the trailblazing husband-and-wife team of Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis. Dancing with the troupe that evening were Martha Graham and Charles Weidman, two figures who would leave a permanent imprimatur on American choreography.

Myra and Louise were in the audience that night, and they were spellbound. They knew a little something about modern dance, but they had never seen the likes of Denishawn. Among the twenty-three arrangements the company performed were “Revolutionary Etude,”
an early nod to proletarian art featuring Martha Graham and set to a stirring piece by Chopin, and “Xochitl,” based on Aztec themes and set against a rich backdrop of costumes and set designs by the Mexican artist Francisco Cornejo.

Because they were well-known in local cultural circles, mother and daughter were invited backstage after the performance to meet Ted Shawn. Louise must have struck Shawn as uncommonly enthusiastic, lithe, or seductive—or perhaps just persistent. By the evening’s end, he had offered her a place at Denishawn’s summer school in New York—a feeder to the company’s professional ranks. Louise accepted on the spot, and though it took some convincing, Myra was able to talk her husband into covering the $300 tuition and letting his fifteen-year-old daughter venture on her own to the wilds of Manhattan.

Almost on her own, that is. Leonard Brooks stipulated that his daughter be chaperoned by Alice Mills, a middle-aged neighbor whom Louise described as “a stocky, bespectacled housewife.”
⁹
As luck would have it, Louise and Mrs. Mills got along just fine. Louise “tolerated Mrs. Mills’ provincialism” because they shared a “love of the theatre. Together, we saw all of the Broadway shows, one of them being a favorite of mine—the
Ziegfeld Follies.
In the first act, Fanny Brice’s burlesque of Pavlova’s swan dance filled the New Amsterdam Theatre with laughter.”

That summer, Louise and Mrs. Mills shared a small railroad flat on West Eighty-sixth Street near Riverside Drive, just thirty blocks south of Columbia University. For four hours each day, Louise and the other protégés sweated through grueling lessons in balance work and body control in a sweltering church basement at Broadway and Seventy-second Street. “Even in the ballet work, we danced barefoot,” Louise remembered, “which was painful for unaccustomed feet on the splintering pine floor.
¹⁰
Having gone barefoot through Kansas summers, I was spared the torn soles and blisters that tormented some of the pupils.”

Of all the summer students, Louise stood out—so much so that in August, Ted Shawn invited her to join the company and tour full-time with the other dancers. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. Louise was smitten by New York, and it didn’t take long before she realized that
returning to Wichita was not an option. She never went back to school, and except for a few years in the early 1950s, she never again lived in Kansas.

So began Louise’s stab at the great American art of self-reinvention. It was one thing to take the country girl out of the country. Could she also take the country out of the country girl? With Mrs. Mills back in Wichita, Louise had a chance to find out.

“In 1922,” she later wrote, “if I was to create my dream women, I had to get rid of my Kansas accent, to learn the etiquette of the social elite, and to learn to dress beautifully.
¹¹
I could not correct my speech at a fashionable girls’ school. I could not learn table manners from escorts embarrassed by my social inferiority. I could not afford Fifth Avenue couturiers. Therefore, I went for my education directly to the unknown people at the bottom who were experts in such matters—the people at the bottom whose services supported the people at the top of New York.”

For elocution lessons, Louise turned to a working-class undergrad at Columbia University who was financing his college education by moonlighting as a soda jerk at a Broadway drugstore. Addicted to fudge sundaes, Louise was a regular at the counter and just barely tolerated the young man’s uncanny aptitude for mimicking her flat midwestern accent.

“One day when the soda jerk was making the customers at the fountain laugh with a story about ‘mulking a kee-yow,’ I stopped him, saying, ‘Instead of making fun of me, why don’t you teach me how to say it?’ While he was concocting a banana split, he began to smile at the fancy of becoming my Pygmalion.”

What the soda jerk lacked in charm—“Not ‘watter’ as in ‘hotter,’ ” he snapped, “but ‘water’ as in ‘daughter.’ And it’s not ‘hep,’ you hayseed—it’s ‘help,’ ‘help,’ ‘help!’ ”—he made up for in precision. A few weeks and not a few fudge sundaes later, Louise graduated from the drugstore academy pronouncing her words like a real northeasterner.

The soda jerk on Broadway wasn’t much help when it came to clothing and comportment, but Louise was a quick study. Through
one of her friends, Barbara Bennett, the scion of a prominent stage family, Louise met a wide assortment of bankers and lawyers “who made it possible for me to buy expensive clothes. These most eligible bachelors in their thirties, finding debutantes a threat, turned to pretty girls in the theatre.” She would later describe the delicate game of give-and-take by which “the extravagant sums given to the girls for clothes were part of the fun—part of competing to see whose girl would win the Best-Dressed title. Sexual submission was not a condition of this arrangement, although many affairs grew out of it.”

When her wealthy escorts weren’t looking, Louise consulted the waiters at Manhattan’s best restaurants—the same watering holes that Lipstick gossiped about in the pages of
The New Yorker—
for tips on what to order and how to order it. Her syllabus at the Colony included “how-to-bone-a-brook-trout night, how-to-fork-snails night, how-to-dismember-artichokes night, and so on, until we came to the bottom of the menu, which included a dessert [requiring] the understanding and proper pronunciation of French words.”

It was easy enough for Louise to keep her romantic and sexual exploits from the Denishawn dancers when the company was rehearsing in New York. But when they were on the road, her loose lifestyle led her to clash with Ruth St. Denis, the famously stern matron of the company, who closely guarded her dancers’ morals.

Louise was a skilled performer and an important member of the troupe. She enjoyed billings with Martha Graham. But “she was very flirty in the hotels,” another Denishawn dancer recalled, “and it was quite easy for men to have a conversation with her. … 
¹²
Somebody did say one time that she stayed with somebody one night. We were so excited about that we didn’t know what to do!”

Matters came to a head late in the spring of 1924, two years after Louise joined Denishawn. Rumors of Louise’s extracurricular activities—not to mention her strong resistance to authority, which manifested itself increasingly during rehearsals—were causing a disruption among the other dancers. With the full company assembled, St. Denis dealt her a crushing, public blow. “Louise,” St. Denis began, as everyone else looked on, “to be brief and to the point—not to
keep you from your more pressing concerns—I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver.”

Louise didn’t even know what a salver was. She had to ask Barbara Bennett. “At 17,” she wrote years later, “my first and blackest humiliation—and in public too.”

Things got worse. Shortly after her unexpected departure from Denishawn, Louise moved into a suite at the Algonquin Hotel.
¹³
How she paid for it, she never explained. From a corner perch in the Rose Room, she observed “Robert Sherwood and Dorothy Parker and a lot of other people jabbering away and waving their hands at the Round Table, wondering what made them so famous.”